Not since William Tecumseh Sherman has one person raised so much havoc in Atlanta as former Falcon quarterback Michael Vick has over the past year.
The latest came yesterday when head coach Bobby Petrino quit the team with three games left in the season to return to coaching at the college ranks.
On Monday, Vick was sentenced to 23 months in prison for running a dog fighting operation and lying to cover it up.
That came months after Vick was suspended upon his indictment on the charges.
That move came after the Falcons traded their backup quarterback Matt Schaub to the Houston Texans, expecting Vick to be around to lead the team.
The Falcons have completely fallen apart. It will take years for them to regain the ground Vick's legal woes have cost them.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Ike Turner is dead
Ike Turner — musician, songwriter, producer, inventor of the bitch slap — died today in San Diego at age 76.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Coming Soon: aL, La and the Magical Municipal Tour
This post originally appeared at Lafayette Pro Fiber: http://www.lafayetteprofiber.com/Blog/Blog.html
As we head to the end of this year, the pace of progress on the LUS fiber project is increasing. The electronics vendor has been selected; property for the head-end has been purchased; a building for that is not far off.
Some of the specifics of the network offerings have become public, the most notable of which is the fact that every LUS fiber customer will have 100 megabits per second of in-system connectivity. What that means is that Lafayette will have an intranet that will rival any corporate or academic campus in the world.
This will create the opportunity fundamentally change life in Lafayette. With that much in-system bandwidth available, it will be possible for a new, asynchronous Lafayette to emerge — asynchronous Lafayette, Louisiana (aL, La).
Lafayette and The Network
The power of networks to drive change is well documented. There is Metcalfe's Law. There is the fabulous, thought-provoking 2002 book by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of Networks, which explores the power of networks and what new, more powerful networks mean for science, business and everyday life. I'm sure you can find other examples and references.
Because of the design of the LUS network and the commitment to create an intranet for customers of that network, Lafayette is going to be a community where the impact of this meeting of network power and the various aspects of network connected life will be explored first. We will be pioneers on the great adventure that will not come to other communities in our country and the world for years — if not decades — to come.
All that bandwidth will mean that access to aspects of life Lafayette will no longer be tied to time. That is, large swaths of public life in Lafayette will migrate to a point where access to events will no longer depend on your ability to physically show up. Any public event in Lafayette will have the potential to be preserved for posterity.
The path to opportunity in Lafayette will run along the ability of government, companies, institutions, associations, clubs and individuals to push the transition from 'Lafayette in the now' to 'asynchronous Lafayette.'
The LUS fiber system and the intranet capability it will provide its customers will make it difficult to leave Lafayette. Life will be different from other places here. We will miss the amenities that the fat connection that the LUS network will afford us. But, if we work this right, we will not have to miss Lafayette in the sense that more of our civic and social life can and will be made available to us via the network in ways that will not require our physical presence at the event in order to observe it or, in some cases, participate in it.
We won't stop attending these events, but the LUS network will enable citizens here to experience more of Lafayette life because those events will be available to us at times that our hectic lives — family, work, and play — don't currently allow. For instance, I like good music, but I can't always find the time to say, go to a Louisiana Crossroads performance. Or, maybe I have to be out of town on the night that there's a PASA show that I'd otherwise like to catch.
In asynchronous Lafayette, those events could be captured, stored and be made accessible to folks who can't attend the live event — or who might want to experience the event from a different perspective.
This is one way that the network will set public life in Lafayette apart from life in other communities.
I think it's important that we focus on this opportunity in order to ensure that the changes resulting from our new distinctiveness enable Lafayette to capture and leverage those aspects of our community that make us unique; that we use our infrastructure to knock down the barriers between us, not to widen existing gaps.
Here are some ideas of how the LUS network might enable asynchronous Lafayette to emerge.
Government
This new infrastructure has the potential to improve the ability of citizens to participate in governmental processes with the result being that government becomes more responsive to them and their needs. In asynchronous Lafayette, public meetings will be recorded, stored and be able to be accessed by citizens who were not able to attend the meeting. Documents presented, discussed or distributed in the meeting will be available for viewing and downloading via the webcast (live and stored) of the session.
Those web-accessed meetings could also have links to allow citizen input on the process. It will mean a number of structural changes will need to take place. First, local government and agencies will need to put cameras and microphones in any room used for public meetings so that the sessions can be recorded. Second, they'll need to invest in the storage capacity to allow these meetings to be tagged and archived for later access. Third, they'll need to provided wider windows of opportunity for citizens to submit formal comment on proposals, issues and ordinances.
I'm not talking about the kind of Blog of the Banshees that the comment sections of The Daily Advertiser and other papers have become; but a formal channel for citizen comment and involvement that will become part of the permanent public record of the proceedings, even though the citizens might not have been present at the event when it actually occurred. Asynchronous access to government might actually lend itself to richer, more thoughtful citizen involvement by affording interested parties the opportunity to review the materials and sessions away from the heat of the moment.
Lafayette may need to come up with its own version of public meeting laws to ensure that our rich digital infrastructure is used to enhance citizen access to government and its decision-making processes.
Education
In asynchronous Lafayette, students will never miss another day of class. That is, classrooms could be equipped with cameras and microphones which would enable teachers to deliver their course content in a real-time session that could be available to students too ill to attend class that day. The course could be accessed from home either via a video stream or accessed later when the student was feeling better. When I made this case to my daughter a couple of years ago prior to the fiber election, I have to admit that she was not wild about this idea.
The network will also facilitate more collaborative learning, as students, teachers, even researchers will be able to interact in real time with voice, data and video on projects ranging from homework to science projects to specialized research projects.
Entertainment/Culture
We can use this infrastructure to improve and enrich Lafayette's cultural life and, in the process, bolster and sustain artists and the institutions that support them.
Asynchronous Lafayette will be a boon to businesses built around entertainment and culture. More specifically those places offering 'live' music are going to have a real opportunity to emerge as global purveyors of our musical culture. There's a hint of what is possible by what's transpired in Austin, Texas. Austin City Limits helped transform that city into a multi-media entertainment center, drawing musicians from around to world to a place that has no obvious other reason to attract them. The show now has its own music festival.
Big whoop.
Imagine asynchronous Lafayette, where we are capturing on video live performances at Grant Street Dancehall, the Blue Moon Saloon, Louisiana Crossroads, Festival International, Festival Acadiens, Downtown Alive, the Heymann Center, and other venues. We could establish our city as THE live music capital of the world by letting the world access all the great live music that we grow and bring here.
Put cameras in the venues, run a feed out of the sound boards and — voila! — shows could be streamed over the web and stored on servers here in Lafayette for later access. The webcast versions could be free or very inexpensive, serving to feed demand for the higher quality recordings of the sessions that could be produced from the archived digital files and sold at a premium.
I happened to catch T. Bone Burnett on The Charlie Rose show on LPB the other night. In that segment (he was on as the producer of the new Robert Plant and Allison Krause album Raising Sand), Burnett said that he believed the future of the music business would revolve around live performance. He added that he wanted to be involved with producing live shows and the recordings that resulted from them.
Asynchronous Lafayette will be ideally positioned to lead this transition by using our wired infrastructure to enable the capture of high-definition, high-quality recordings of all that great music that is some what wasted when it is only captured by the ears that are in the room.
It'll take some server capacity (hey, Google and Sun both offer 'Data Centers in a Box' that bring huge storage capacity in a modular unit that looks like a shipping container), but opportunities like this are going to abound in the arts in the new, wired, asynchronous Lafayette.
Business
The strictly business crowd (you know, the folks who buy Dell and HP computers) won't be shut out either. In fact, businesses in Lafayette are going to have a strategic advantage due to the bandwidth that the LUS intranet affords them. For starters, it will be possible for businesses in Lafayette to work in a more distributed way. That is, people here will really be able to telecommute (i.e., work from home) in ways that are just not possible now. Massive bandwidth will make information sharing easier so things like white board sharing over multiple locations will be able to take place seamlessly. This could be a key to our traffic problems since no one seems to want to pay for roads.
WebEx and similar services should be recruited to conduct pilots here because the kind of network capacity we have here is going to be a while in reaching the rest of the country. Imagine the possibilities that engineering firms located here will have to look at problems via a network, fashion solutions and get them to the fabrication floor in a much shorter cycle.
Healthcare and Public Health
Healthcare in Lafayette can be fundamentally different than it is in any other place in the country. Home monitoring of patients will be able to rival that currently available only in ICUs. Any kind of telemetry that can be captured from a patient in a hospital will soon be able to be captured from home via the network. This could reduce hospital stays and with that the cost of care — without adversely affecting the quality of care.
A few months ago, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals conducted a series of drills across the state to test preparedness for a potential flu pandemic. I happened to attend a meeting in a community where the results of one such drill were discussed. One aspect of the outbreak that the providers did not mention was the impact of an outbreak on the telecommunications system. In the event of an outbreak, there will likely be a good bit of what people near chemical plants know as "evacuation in place." That is, people will be advised to stay home in order to avoid exposure to the virus that would be causing the flu outbreak.
With the robust telecommunications infrastructure that will be in place in Lafayette, we can diminish the extent of the outbreak by ordering children to stay home from school (with a wired community, teachers could teach from home to students at home). Some companies could have their workers stay home, using the network to conduct their work from there. All of this could have the effect of limiting the extent of the outbreak and, perhaps equally important, limiting the disruption on community life that such an outbreak would otherwise inflict.
Sports
People in Lafayette love sports and they particularly love watching their kids play sports. In asynchronous Lafayette, soccer, baseball, basketball and football games could be recorded, as well as swim meets, track meets, and other events could be recorded and shared. Sports leagues could use the network to produce highlights of games/tournaments, post stats, show standings, schedules and other key information.
Again, what will be needed are cameras, servers and the people to operate them.
Religious, Social & Civic Organizations
Churches, community organizations, civic groups will be able to record their meetings and make the content available to those unable to attend the live event.
Scratching At The Surface
Beginning sometime in late 2008 or so, LUS will begin offering services. At that point, the transformation of Lafayette and the potential it offers will move from the dream state to reality. The possibilities mentioned above are a wholly inadequate and incomplete list that doesn't really even scratch the surface of the potential that awaits us.
Think about your current life in Lafayette. Think of how big bandwidth, affordable network technology can be used to enable you to to connect (or re-connect) to those aspects of life here that interest or intrigue you, but that your schedule will just not allow you to get to.
Thinking this way is how citizens are going to be able to transform life here. It will be a bottom-up process that will be built on the foundation of the Lafayette intranet afforded to us by the LUS fiber network. Digital technology has unleashed revolutions in video, audio, and communications in general. With the bandwidth available to each of us and the institutions we align ourselves with, we can — and will — define new ways of joining, belonging to and participating in these institutions and, through this process, change Lafayette.
This will be an opportunity unique to Lafayette in North America because we will be the largest, most diverse community with access to the fattest network pipes. We can pioneer new and unique approaches to civic, social, cultural and community life using the network, just as our geography shaped those aspects of our life here in the centuries leading up to this point.
As the network builds out and as we begin to capture the potential that our fiber infrastructure will offer us, asynchronous Lafayette can come to embody the notion that you never really have to miss Lafayette at all — at least, not any public event.
The time to think about how to turn that potential into reality is now, just as the LUS network itself is moving from the engineering tables to the streets.
This great adventure of asynchronous Lafayette is coming sooner than you think right down your street. The time has come to start preparing to take advantage of the opportunities that will abound. You're only limit will be your imagination.
Step right this way!
As we head to the end of this year, the pace of progress on the LUS fiber project is increasing. The electronics vendor has been selected; property for the head-end has been purchased; a building for that is not far off.
Some of the specifics of the network offerings have become public, the most notable of which is the fact that every LUS fiber customer will have 100 megabits per second of in-system connectivity. What that means is that Lafayette will have an intranet that will rival any corporate or academic campus in the world.
This will create the opportunity fundamentally change life in Lafayette. With that much in-system bandwidth available, it will be possible for a new, asynchronous Lafayette to emerge — asynchronous Lafayette, Louisiana (aL, La).
Lafayette and The Network
The power of networks to drive change is well documented. There is Metcalfe's Law. There is the fabulous, thought-provoking 2002 book by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of Networks, which explores the power of networks and what new, more powerful networks mean for science, business and everyday life. I'm sure you can find other examples and references.
Because of the design of the LUS network and the commitment to create an intranet for customers of that network, Lafayette is going to be a community where the impact of this meeting of network power and the various aspects of network connected life will be explored first. We will be pioneers on the great adventure that will not come to other communities in our country and the world for years — if not decades — to come.
All that bandwidth will mean that access to aspects of life Lafayette will no longer be tied to time. That is, large swaths of public life in Lafayette will migrate to a point where access to events will no longer depend on your ability to physically show up. Any public event in Lafayette will have the potential to be preserved for posterity.
The path to opportunity in Lafayette will run along the ability of government, companies, institutions, associations, clubs and individuals to push the transition from 'Lafayette in the now' to 'asynchronous Lafayette.'
The LUS fiber system and the intranet capability it will provide its customers will make it difficult to leave Lafayette. Life will be different from other places here. We will miss the amenities that the fat connection that the LUS network will afford us. But, if we work this right, we will not have to miss Lafayette in the sense that more of our civic and social life can and will be made available to us via the network in ways that will not require our physical presence at the event in order to observe it or, in some cases, participate in it.
We won't stop attending these events, but the LUS network will enable citizens here to experience more of Lafayette life because those events will be available to us at times that our hectic lives — family, work, and play — don't currently allow. For instance, I like good music, but I can't always find the time to say, go to a Louisiana Crossroads performance. Or, maybe I have to be out of town on the night that there's a PASA show that I'd otherwise like to catch.
In asynchronous Lafayette, those events could be captured, stored and be made accessible to folks who can't attend the live event — or who might want to experience the event from a different perspective.
This is one way that the network will set public life in Lafayette apart from life in other communities.
I think it's important that we focus on this opportunity in order to ensure that the changes resulting from our new distinctiveness enable Lafayette to capture and leverage those aspects of our community that make us unique; that we use our infrastructure to knock down the barriers between us, not to widen existing gaps.
Here are some ideas of how the LUS network might enable asynchronous Lafayette to emerge.
Government
This new infrastructure has the potential to improve the ability of citizens to participate in governmental processes with the result being that government becomes more responsive to them and their needs. In asynchronous Lafayette, public meetings will be recorded, stored and be able to be accessed by citizens who were not able to attend the meeting. Documents presented, discussed or distributed in the meeting will be available for viewing and downloading via the webcast (live and stored) of the session.
Those web-accessed meetings could also have links to allow citizen input on the process. It will mean a number of structural changes will need to take place. First, local government and agencies will need to put cameras and microphones in any room used for public meetings so that the sessions can be recorded. Second, they'll need to invest in the storage capacity to allow these meetings to be tagged and archived for later access. Third, they'll need to provided wider windows of opportunity for citizens to submit formal comment on proposals, issues and ordinances.
I'm not talking about the kind of Blog of the Banshees that the comment sections of The Daily Advertiser and other papers have become; but a formal channel for citizen comment and involvement that will become part of the permanent public record of the proceedings, even though the citizens might not have been present at the event when it actually occurred. Asynchronous access to government might actually lend itself to richer, more thoughtful citizen involvement by affording interested parties the opportunity to review the materials and sessions away from the heat of the moment.
Lafayette may need to come up with its own version of public meeting laws to ensure that our rich digital infrastructure is used to enhance citizen access to government and its decision-making processes.
Education
In asynchronous Lafayette, students will never miss another day of class. That is, classrooms could be equipped with cameras and microphones which would enable teachers to deliver their course content in a real-time session that could be available to students too ill to attend class that day. The course could be accessed from home either via a video stream or accessed later when the student was feeling better. When I made this case to my daughter a couple of years ago prior to the fiber election, I have to admit that she was not wild about this idea.
The network will also facilitate more collaborative learning, as students, teachers, even researchers will be able to interact in real time with voice, data and video on projects ranging from homework to science projects to specialized research projects.
Entertainment/Culture
We can use this infrastructure to improve and enrich Lafayette's cultural life and, in the process, bolster and sustain artists and the institutions that support them.
Asynchronous Lafayette will be a boon to businesses built around entertainment and culture. More specifically those places offering 'live' music are going to have a real opportunity to emerge as global purveyors of our musical culture. There's a hint of what is possible by what's transpired in Austin, Texas. Austin City Limits helped transform that city into a multi-media entertainment center, drawing musicians from around to world to a place that has no obvious other reason to attract them. The show now has its own music festival.
Big whoop.
Imagine asynchronous Lafayette, where we are capturing on video live performances at Grant Street Dancehall, the Blue Moon Saloon, Louisiana Crossroads, Festival International, Festival Acadiens, Downtown Alive, the Heymann Center, and other venues. We could establish our city as THE live music capital of the world by letting the world access all the great live music that we grow and bring here.
Put cameras in the venues, run a feed out of the sound boards and — voila! — shows could be streamed over the web and stored on servers here in Lafayette for later access. The webcast versions could be free or very inexpensive, serving to feed demand for the higher quality recordings of the sessions that could be produced from the archived digital files and sold at a premium.
I happened to catch T. Bone Burnett on The Charlie Rose show on LPB the other night. In that segment (he was on as the producer of the new Robert Plant and Allison Krause album Raising Sand), Burnett said that he believed the future of the music business would revolve around live performance. He added that he wanted to be involved with producing live shows and the recordings that resulted from them.
Asynchronous Lafayette will be ideally positioned to lead this transition by using our wired infrastructure to enable the capture of high-definition, high-quality recordings of all that great music that is some what wasted when it is only captured by the ears that are in the room.
It'll take some server capacity (hey, Google and Sun both offer 'Data Centers in a Box' that bring huge storage capacity in a modular unit that looks like a shipping container), but opportunities like this are going to abound in the arts in the new, wired, asynchronous Lafayette.
Business
The strictly business crowd (you know, the folks who buy Dell and HP computers) won't be shut out either. In fact, businesses in Lafayette are going to have a strategic advantage due to the bandwidth that the LUS intranet affords them. For starters, it will be possible for businesses in Lafayette to work in a more distributed way. That is, people here will really be able to telecommute (i.e., work from home) in ways that are just not possible now. Massive bandwidth will make information sharing easier so things like white board sharing over multiple locations will be able to take place seamlessly. This could be a key to our traffic problems since no one seems to want to pay for roads.
WebEx and similar services should be recruited to conduct pilots here because the kind of network capacity we have here is going to be a while in reaching the rest of the country. Imagine the possibilities that engineering firms located here will have to look at problems via a network, fashion solutions and get them to the fabrication floor in a much shorter cycle.
Healthcare and Public Health
Healthcare in Lafayette can be fundamentally different than it is in any other place in the country. Home monitoring of patients will be able to rival that currently available only in ICUs. Any kind of telemetry that can be captured from a patient in a hospital will soon be able to be captured from home via the network. This could reduce hospital stays and with that the cost of care — without adversely affecting the quality of care.
A few months ago, the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals conducted a series of drills across the state to test preparedness for a potential flu pandemic. I happened to attend a meeting in a community where the results of one such drill were discussed. One aspect of the outbreak that the providers did not mention was the impact of an outbreak on the telecommunications system. In the event of an outbreak, there will likely be a good bit of what people near chemical plants know as "evacuation in place." That is, people will be advised to stay home in order to avoid exposure to the virus that would be causing the flu outbreak.
With the robust telecommunications infrastructure that will be in place in Lafayette, we can diminish the extent of the outbreak by ordering children to stay home from school (with a wired community, teachers could teach from home to students at home). Some companies could have their workers stay home, using the network to conduct their work from there. All of this could have the effect of limiting the extent of the outbreak and, perhaps equally important, limiting the disruption on community life that such an outbreak would otherwise inflict.
Sports
People in Lafayette love sports and they particularly love watching their kids play sports. In asynchronous Lafayette, soccer, baseball, basketball and football games could be recorded, as well as swim meets, track meets, and other events could be recorded and shared. Sports leagues could use the network to produce highlights of games/tournaments, post stats, show standings, schedules and other key information.
Again, what will be needed are cameras, servers and the people to operate them.
Religious, Social & Civic Organizations
Churches, community organizations, civic groups will be able to record their meetings and make the content available to those unable to attend the live event.
Scratching At The Surface
Beginning sometime in late 2008 or so, LUS will begin offering services. At that point, the transformation of Lafayette and the potential it offers will move from the dream state to reality. The possibilities mentioned above are a wholly inadequate and incomplete list that doesn't really even scratch the surface of the potential that awaits us.
Think about your current life in Lafayette. Think of how big bandwidth, affordable network technology can be used to enable you to to connect (or re-connect) to those aspects of life here that interest or intrigue you, but that your schedule will just not allow you to get to.
Thinking this way is how citizens are going to be able to transform life here. It will be a bottom-up process that will be built on the foundation of the Lafayette intranet afforded to us by the LUS fiber network. Digital technology has unleashed revolutions in video, audio, and communications in general. With the bandwidth available to each of us and the institutions we align ourselves with, we can — and will — define new ways of joining, belonging to and participating in these institutions and, through this process, change Lafayette.
This will be an opportunity unique to Lafayette in North America because we will be the largest, most diverse community with access to the fattest network pipes. We can pioneer new and unique approaches to civic, social, cultural and community life using the network, just as our geography shaped those aspects of our life here in the centuries leading up to this point.
As the network builds out and as we begin to capture the potential that our fiber infrastructure will offer us, asynchronous Lafayette can come to embody the notion that you never really have to miss Lafayette at all — at least, not any public event.
The time to think about how to turn that potential into reality is now, just as the LUS network itself is moving from the engineering tables to the streets.
This great adventure of asynchronous Lafayette is coming sooner than you think right down your street. The time has come to start preparing to take advantage of the opportunities that will abound. You're only limit will be your imagination.
Step right this way!
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Joey Durel and Lafayette Complacency
It appears that City/Parish President Joey Durel will be handed a second term without a contested election. Using his first term as a guide, even his supporters are going to regret this.
Durel's first term has been characterized by cronyism, war on first responders, a failure to provide community leadership, and isolating Lafayette in the Legislature by repeatedly selling out the long-term interests of other communities for what were falsely believed to be Lafayette's short-term interests.
The tacit approval that the leadership of the community gives Durel despite these lapses indicates a sense of smugness that is not conducive to the continued progress of the community.
Here are examples of each of Durel's failures:
Cronyism: Early in his term, Durel worked hard to convince the Parish Council to change the rules for the hiring of police chiefs in the City of Lafayette. At Durel's insistence, the rules were changed to drop a series of requirements that would otherwise have prevented a lifelong friend from being named chief. The council waived the rules; Durel's pal Randy Hundley was named chief. That sad saga is still playing itself out in the criminal courts.
Had Durel worked as hard to get a proposed parish road tax passed in 2006 as he did to get Hundley named chief, we might actually have a chance for better traffic conditions in the parish. Given the opportunity, Durel worked hard for his friend, but was a slacker when it came to acting on behalf of the public good in the form of the road tax.
Making government work for his friends has been the hallmark of Durel's first term. Nowhere is that more pronounced than the 'welfare for developers' approach to public resources that Durel espouses and defends.
According to public information, Consolidated Government invests more than $3,000 in infrastructure for every lot in every subdivision that developers produce. Despite embracing the warm and fuzzy "smart growth" mantra, Durel staunchly refuses to make his developer friends pick up the tab for the public works that make their ventures so lucrative.
Development impact fees have proven to be effective tools to defray the infrastructure costs imposed by new developments in other communities. Durel will have none of it. Instead, Durel prefers to have Consolidated Government (i.e., the rest of us) absorb those costs and cut other services as a means to protect the bankbooks of his developer friends.
Durel is rewarded in full for his loyalty with campaign contributions (and other amenities) but the community as a whole pays the price through diminished infrastructure investments in other segments of the parish.
War on First Responders: Durel used his 2007 "State of the Parish" dog and pony show to talk about the importance of law enforcement in his administration. Yes, this is after the Hundley matter had come to light! Still, there stood Durel laying down the law and order gauntlet for anyone willing to spend $25 to hear him.
Funny thing is that while Durel was delivering those comments, his administration was continuing to stiff Lafayette police and firefighters over millions in back pay they are owed for money illegally withheld from them. The suit has been hanging out there for eight years, half of those years on Durel's watch.
So, Durel manipulates the hiring process to get a crony appointed police chief while stiffing policemen (and firefighters) on money the Louisiana Supreme Court says they are owed. Meanwhile, out of the other side of his mouth, Durel is championing his commitment to law and order. Sweet.
No doubt the money needed to pay the police and firefighters is a significant chunk of change, but how much is city/parish government subsidizing developers each year? Maybe police and firefighters would have a better shot at getting paid if they called themselves 'developers' instead of 'public servants'?
Failure to Lead: The top elected official represents everyone in the district, whether they like it or not — including those who didn't support the election of that official.
Durel as city/parish president has never gotten this. He won election in 2003 by about 4 percent of the vote. He was elected by the Southside. He has governed as though he is president of the Southside, not the entire parish. Nowhere is that more evident than on the matter of race relations. Durel's greatest failure as city/parish president has been in the area of race relations.
Durel fiddled while the Martin Luther King street naming fiasco burned through the council and, in the process, the community. He let it smolder and consume what precious little good will existed between whites and blacks in Lafayette until that issue arose. In a startling lack of leadership, Durel spent no political capital among council members trying to get them to move (for the good of the community) beyond the petty grudges they held against each other.
This episode demonstrated that Durel has not grown into the office; instead, he's proven that you can take the boy out of the Southside, but you can't take the Southside out of the boy.
The reason this matters is that Lafayette has put its dollars where Richard Florida's words have been. Florida is the author of "The Rise of the Creative Class," which holds that communities that will flourish in this century are those that can attract the innovators who are driving the new economy. In Florida's formula, in order to succeed communities will have to have what he calls "the three Ts": talent, technology and tolerance.
Lafayette has invested a great deal developing talent and our technology but, as the King street-naming episode illustrated, tolerance here is in short supply. So, too, was Durel's leadership. A true leader would not have allowed the King thing to spiral out of control before getting involved. Lafayette paid a heavy price for the damage that episode did to our image as a progressive community. As a one-time event it's an aberration; but without a concerted effort to heal the rifts exposed and deepened by that episode long-term damage to our prospects to result.
Isolating Lafayette in the Legislature: The LUS fiber project is Durel's claim to fame. It's important to remember that the plan was waiting for him when he took office. To his credit he embraced the idea and his championing of that project is a big reason that the measure ultimately won voter approval and will be built.
However, Durel has cost Lafayette a considerable amount of money as well as good will across the state through his administration's mishandling of the attempts by BellSouth and Cox to kill this project.
The initial attempt to kill the project came in Baton Rouge where BellSouth and Cox worked to pass a law that would have banned municipalities from getting into the bandwidth business. A delegation from Lafayette supporting the LUS project met with Governor Blanco. She reportedly told them that she would veto any bill that Lafayette felt it could not live with.
The problem came when Durel and his advisors accepted a bill (now law as the "Municipal Fair Competition Act") that not only provided a platform for a series of lawsuits against Lafayette, but also erected barriers that will prevent other Louisiana cities with municipally owned utility systems from launching ventures similar to the LUS fiber project.
Durel and his team decided the terms of the bill were not onerous enough to stop their project. They accepted the terms, in effect burning the bandwidth bridge behind them, leaving other municipalities stranded on the far side of the digital divide.
BellSouth, Cox and their allies then used the provisions in the law accepted by Durel and Company to file a series of lawsuits against the LUS project that ended up costing Lafayette tax payers about $2 million in legal fees.
But, Durel was not finished selling out other communities in the state on bandwidth issues.
In 2006, BellSouth/AT&T was pushing for a statewide video franchise agreement, which would have taken control of rights of way away from municipalities and property owners and handed it to the phone company. While the Louisiana Municipal Association, the Police Jury Association of Louisiana and property owner groups tried to fight this bill, Lafayette sat on the sidelines. Why? Because Durel believed he had reached an agreement with BellSouth/AT&T where Lafayette would not to fight the proposed law in exchange for the phone giant not bringing further lawsuits against the LUS project.
To the surprise of no one outside of the Durel administration, the lawsuits continued, but Lafayette succeeded in earning a fair amount of ill will because of its continued willingness under Durel to sell out other communities in the hope of short-term advantage.
Flash forward to the 2007 session of the Legislature when Durel touted an idea to stimulate road building in fast-growing communities by allowing sales taxes from auto sales to remain in the possession of local governments, rather than going to Baton Rouge.
The legislation ties together key elements of the worst aspects of Durel's first term. On the one hand, Lafayette legislators and Durel say they don't want to play the dirty money games in Baton Rouge; on the other hand, they make a grab for state money to build roads. Even after that defeat, Durel seems no more inclined to do the sales job of winning support for local financing for our own road projects here through either taxes or development fees. Who's going to pay for these roads? Santa Claus is booked through December and I hear the Easter Bunny lost a bundle in sub-prime mortgages.
The failure of the road legislation demonstrated the extent to which Lafayette under Durel has become isolated in the workings of the Legislature. Despite the fact that Lafayette had a resident as the sitting governor and with another resident serving as Commissioner of Administration local government has virtually nothing to show for four years of what should have been an ideal political situation.
It's really pretty astounding that the city/parish president couldn't find a way to work with this governor. Just about every other local government leader has figured out how to get local projects funded in Baton Rouge. Not Durel. A better opportunity for progress will not likely present itself for this community anytime soon.
So, cronyism, government for the benefit of the few, war on first responders, failure to lead the community on issues that go to the heart of our ability to advance, and pursuing a strategy that has squandered political advantage in state government are what Durel has given us in his first term.
That Durel's record is considered 'good enough for Lafayette' and its business community indicates a lack of imagination that does not bode well for the future of the parish. Progress comes from not being willing to settle for 'good enough,' from not being willing to accept the status quo. Smug self-satisfaction is not the hallmark of a community on the rise.
If this parish does, in fact, believe that we can't do any better than we are now, then we won't. Is this as good as it gets? We had better hope not.
Durel's first term has been characterized by cronyism, war on first responders, a failure to provide community leadership, and isolating Lafayette in the Legislature by repeatedly selling out the long-term interests of other communities for what were falsely believed to be Lafayette's short-term interests.
The tacit approval that the leadership of the community gives Durel despite these lapses indicates a sense of smugness that is not conducive to the continued progress of the community.
Here are examples of each of Durel's failures:
Cronyism: Early in his term, Durel worked hard to convince the Parish Council to change the rules for the hiring of police chiefs in the City of Lafayette. At Durel's insistence, the rules were changed to drop a series of requirements that would otherwise have prevented a lifelong friend from being named chief. The council waived the rules; Durel's pal Randy Hundley was named chief. That sad saga is still playing itself out in the criminal courts.
Had Durel worked as hard to get a proposed parish road tax passed in 2006 as he did to get Hundley named chief, we might actually have a chance for better traffic conditions in the parish. Given the opportunity, Durel worked hard for his friend, but was a slacker when it came to acting on behalf of the public good in the form of the road tax.
Making government work for his friends has been the hallmark of Durel's first term. Nowhere is that more pronounced than the 'welfare for developers' approach to public resources that Durel espouses and defends.
According to public information, Consolidated Government invests more than $3,000 in infrastructure for every lot in every subdivision that developers produce. Despite embracing the warm and fuzzy "smart growth" mantra, Durel staunchly refuses to make his developer friends pick up the tab for the public works that make their ventures so lucrative.
Development impact fees have proven to be effective tools to defray the infrastructure costs imposed by new developments in other communities. Durel will have none of it. Instead, Durel prefers to have Consolidated Government (i.e., the rest of us) absorb those costs and cut other services as a means to protect the bankbooks of his developer friends.
Durel is rewarded in full for his loyalty with campaign contributions (and other amenities) but the community as a whole pays the price through diminished infrastructure investments in other segments of the parish.
War on First Responders: Durel used his 2007 "State of the Parish" dog and pony show to talk about the importance of law enforcement in his administration. Yes, this is after the Hundley matter had come to light! Still, there stood Durel laying down the law and order gauntlet for anyone willing to spend $25 to hear him.
Funny thing is that while Durel was delivering those comments, his administration was continuing to stiff Lafayette police and firefighters over millions in back pay they are owed for money illegally withheld from them. The suit has been hanging out there for eight years, half of those years on Durel's watch.
So, Durel manipulates the hiring process to get a crony appointed police chief while stiffing policemen (and firefighters) on money the Louisiana Supreme Court says they are owed. Meanwhile, out of the other side of his mouth, Durel is championing his commitment to law and order. Sweet.
No doubt the money needed to pay the police and firefighters is a significant chunk of change, but how much is city/parish government subsidizing developers each year? Maybe police and firefighters would have a better shot at getting paid if they called themselves 'developers' instead of 'public servants'?
Failure to Lead: The top elected official represents everyone in the district, whether they like it or not — including those who didn't support the election of that official.
Durel as city/parish president has never gotten this. He won election in 2003 by about 4 percent of the vote. He was elected by the Southside. He has governed as though he is president of the Southside, not the entire parish. Nowhere is that more evident than on the matter of race relations. Durel's greatest failure as city/parish president has been in the area of race relations.
Durel fiddled while the Martin Luther King street naming fiasco burned through the council and, in the process, the community. He let it smolder and consume what precious little good will existed between whites and blacks in Lafayette until that issue arose. In a startling lack of leadership, Durel spent no political capital among council members trying to get them to move (for the good of the community) beyond the petty grudges they held against each other.
This episode demonstrated that Durel has not grown into the office; instead, he's proven that you can take the boy out of the Southside, but you can't take the Southside out of the boy.
The reason this matters is that Lafayette has put its dollars where Richard Florida's words have been. Florida is the author of "The Rise of the Creative Class," which holds that communities that will flourish in this century are those that can attract the innovators who are driving the new economy. In Florida's formula, in order to succeed communities will have to have what he calls "the three Ts": talent, technology and tolerance.
Lafayette has invested a great deal developing talent and our technology but, as the King street-naming episode illustrated, tolerance here is in short supply. So, too, was Durel's leadership. A true leader would not have allowed the King thing to spiral out of control before getting involved. Lafayette paid a heavy price for the damage that episode did to our image as a progressive community. As a one-time event it's an aberration; but without a concerted effort to heal the rifts exposed and deepened by that episode long-term damage to our prospects to result.
Isolating Lafayette in the Legislature: The LUS fiber project is Durel's claim to fame. It's important to remember that the plan was waiting for him when he took office. To his credit he embraced the idea and his championing of that project is a big reason that the measure ultimately won voter approval and will be built.
However, Durel has cost Lafayette a considerable amount of money as well as good will across the state through his administration's mishandling of the attempts by BellSouth and Cox to kill this project.
The initial attempt to kill the project came in Baton Rouge where BellSouth and Cox worked to pass a law that would have banned municipalities from getting into the bandwidth business. A delegation from Lafayette supporting the LUS project met with Governor Blanco. She reportedly told them that she would veto any bill that Lafayette felt it could not live with.
The problem came when Durel and his advisors accepted a bill (now law as the "Municipal Fair Competition Act") that not only provided a platform for a series of lawsuits against Lafayette, but also erected barriers that will prevent other Louisiana cities with municipally owned utility systems from launching ventures similar to the LUS fiber project.
Durel and his team decided the terms of the bill were not onerous enough to stop their project. They accepted the terms, in effect burning the bandwidth bridge behind them, leaving other municipalities stranded on the far side of the digital divide.
BellSouth, Cox and their allies then used the provisions in the law accepted by Durel and Company to file a series of lawsuits against the LUS project that ended up costing Lafayette tax payers about $2 million in legal fees.
But, Durel was not finished selling out other communities in the state on bandwidth issues.
In 2006, BellSouth/AT&T was pushing for a statewide video franchise agreement, which would have taken control of rights of way away from municipalities and property owners and handed it to the phone company. While the Louisiana Municipal Association, the Police Jury Association of Louisiana and property owner groups tried to fight this bill, Lafayette sat on the sidelines. Why? Because Durel believed he had reached an agreement with BellSouth/AT&T where Lafayette would not to fight the proposed law in exchange for the phone giant not bringing further lawsuits against the LUS project.
To the surprise of no one outside of the Durel administration, the lawsuits continued, but Lafayette succeeded in earning a fair amount of ill will because of its continued willingness under Durel to sell out other communities in the hope of short-term advantage.
Flash forward to the 2007 session of the Legislature when Durel touted an idea to stimulate road building in fast-growing communities by allowing sales taxes from auto sales to remain in the possession of local governments, rather than going to Baton Rouge.
The legislation ties together key elements of the worst aspects of Durel's first term. On the one hand, Lafayette legislators and Durel say they don't want to play the dirty money games in Baton Rouge; on the other hand, they make a grab for state money to build roads. Even after that defeat, Durel seems no more inclined to do the sales job of winning support for local financing for our own road projects here through either taxes or development fees. Who's going to pay for these roads? Santa Claus is booked through December and I hear the Easter Bunny lost a bundle in sub-prime mortgages.
The failure of the road legislation demonstrated the extent to which Lafayette under Durel has become isolated in the workings of the Legislature. Despite the fact that Lafayette had a resident as the sitting governor and with another resident serving as Commissioner of Administration local government has virtually nothing to show for four years of what should have been an ideal political situation.
It's really pretty astounding that the city/parish president couldn't find a way to work with this governor. Just about every other local government leader has figured out how to get local projects funded in Baton Rouge. Not Durel. A better opportunity for progress will not likely present itself for this community anytime soon.
So, cronyism, government for the benefit of the few, war on first responders, failure to lead the community on issues that go to the heart of our ability to advance, and pursuing a strategy that has squandered political advantage in state government are what Durel has given us in his first term.
That Durel's record is considered 'good enough for Lafayette' and its business community indicates a lack of imagination that does not bode well for the future of the parish. Progress comes from not being willing to settle for 'good enough,' from not being willing to accept the status quo. Smug self-satisfaction is not the hallmark of a community on the rise.
If this parish does, in fact, believe that we can't do any better than we are now, then we won't. Is this as good as it gets? We had better hope not.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Florida heads to Canada; Who will head ULL?
"Creative Class" author and economist Richard Florida is doing a reverse snow bird and heading north to the University of Toronto's up-and-coming Rotman School of Management.
The Washington Post story on Florida's decision to leave George Mason University in Virgninia provides this information:
One possibility that has opened up with the announced retirement of ULL President Ray Authement is that the new president (whoever he or she may be) will have the opportunity to energize faculty recruitment (hell, energizing anything on campus would be an improvement).
The horse farm fiasco is not what tarnished Authement's legacy at the university. That episode was symptomatic of the larger problem which was the loss of his ability to distinguish the interests of the university from his own interests and those of his circle of friends.
After 30-plus years of the same management, my hope is that the next president of ULL will be someone young and out to make a name for themselves (much like Authement was when he first took the post). Rather than looking to build an empire here, the university would really be best served if the next president is some energetic person who comes here looking to shake the place up; someone seeking create some a buzz about the university that matches the growing buzz about Lafayette in business and technology circles around the country, and then used their good work here to move on to something else.
There's some serious plaque in the academic and operational arteries of ULL. What this university needs is the anti-Authement: someone with no ties to the status quo and with an eye to letting their great work here serve as a spring board to something bigger and better down the road.
ULL won't thrive if the job of president comes to be viewed as the last stop before retirement for someone who made their reputation back in the day. And, if ULL doesn't thrive, it will be a brake on Lafayette and the region at a time when our community needs ULL to be contributing to the forward thrust.
The Washington Post story on Florida's decision to leave George Mason University in Virgninia provides this information:
Florida, who joined GMU in 2004, has theorized that smart, innovative thinkers -- such as engineers, writers, entertainers and artists -- are crucial to the success of U.S. cities. He expounded those theories in two top-selling books: "The Rise of the Creative Class," published in 2002, and "The Flight of the Creative Class," published in 2005.So, Florida, who spoke in Lafayette a couple of years ago as part of The Independent/IberiaBank speaker series, will still be looking at issues that have significance for those of us in Lafayette who are committed to driving change and growth using technology and innovation.
His departure comes just a few months after GMU featured him in a Business Week advertisement touting the Washington region's blend of cultural, sports, academic and service amenities as being a magnet for the best and brightest young people.
At Rotman, Florida will be a professor of business economics and academic director of the school's newly established Centre for Jurisdictional Advantage and Prosperity, a $120 million project to study how localities make themselves more attractive to companies and top-flight talent.
One possibility that has opened up with the announced retirement of ULL President Ray Authement is that the new president (whoever he or she may be) will have the opportunity to energize faculty recruitment (hell, energizing anything on campus would be an improvement).
The horse farm fiasco is not what tarnished Authement's legacy at the university. That episode was symptomatic of the larger problem which was the loss of his ability to distinguish the interests of the university from his own interests and those of his circle of friends.
After 30-plus years of the same management, my hope is that the next president of ULL will be someone young and out to make a name for themselves (much like Authement was when he first took the post). Rather than looking to build an empire here, the university would really be best served if the next president is some energetic person who comes here looking to shake the place up; someone seeking create some a buzz about the university that matches the growing buzz about Lafayette in business and technology circles around the country, and then used their good work here to move on to something else.
There's some serious plaque in the academic and operational arteries of ULL. What this university needs is the anti-Authement: someone with no ties to the status quo and with an eye to letting their great work here serve as a spring board to something bigger and better down the road.
ULL won't thrive if the job of president comes to be viewed as the last stop before retirement for someone who made their reputation back in the day. And, if ULL doesn't thrive, it will be a brake on Lafayette and the region at a time when our community needs ULL to be contributing to the forward thrust.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Acadiana Counters the Filibuster
Lafayette and Acadiana joined with MoveOn.org members at about 130 sites on Tuesday evening to calling on Republicans in the U.S. Senate to end their obstruction to changes in U.S. policy in Iraq. The event was held in front of the John Shaw Federal Courthouse in downtown Lafayette. It drew about 20 participants including Republicans, veterans, members of Pax Christi, and, of course, members of MoveOn.org.
We also drew three counter-counter-filibusterers (people who support the war). As the event progressed, they ended up being badly outnumbered.
It was a very moving event and one that drew significant media attention. Here's the story from The Advocate. Here's the story from The Daily Advertiser.
Our target was disgraced Louisiana Senator David Vitter. Vitter pretended to work in Washington on Tuesday, being hounded by the media for answers to questions he refuses to take.
If this man is serious about redeeming his political soul, one possible path would be to demonstrate that he is willing to put the good of the country ahead the good of his party and stop defending a failed policy in Iraq that has destabilized South Asia and the Middle East, turned Iraq in to a recruiting weapon for Al Queida, and imperiling the viability of the Army and Marines, as well as the safety of the country.
Other Republicans are listening. Vitter has yet to demonstrate that he cares for anything but saving his own skin.
We also drew three counter-counter-filibusterers (people who support the war). As the event progressed, they ended up being badly outnumbered.
It was a very moving event and one that drew significant media attention. Here's the story from The Advocate. Here's the story from The Daily Advertiser.
Our target was disgraced Louisiana Senator David Vitter. Vitter pretended to work in Washington on Tuesday, being hounded by the media for answers to questions he refuses to take.
If this man is serious about redeeming his political soul, one possible path would be to demonstrate that he is willing to put the good of the country ahead the good of his party and stop defending a failed policy in Iraq that has destabilized South Asia and the Middle East, turned Iraq in to a recruiting weapon for Al Queida, and imperiling the viability of the Army and Marines, as well as the safety of the country.
Other Republicans are listening. Vitter has yet to demonstrate that he cares for anything but saving his own skin.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Blanco Reaffirms Louisiana Commitment to Sanctity of Sperm
Governor Kathleen Blanco signed yet another act of the Louisiana Legislature that reaffirms the second class status of women under Louisiana law.
You can read about the current law here.
As you may recall, last year the Legislature passed and Blanco signed a law that apes a South Dakota law that bans abortions — even when the life of the mother is at stake — without exceptions for rape and incest victims.
Let's see. Among the worst states in quality of education. Among the highest states with the percentage of people not covered by health insurance. The state with the highest rate of incarceration. Among the highest rates of poverty. And the toughest abortion laws in the country.
Looks like that last one is a good fit with the rest of that list.
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